


Anger

by Helig



Series: Tales from Almyra [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Attempted Murder, Bullying, Major Character Injury, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:06:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28595196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helig/pseuds/Helig
Summary: few things can prepare you for the society that immediately rejects you
Series: Tales from Almyra [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2095332
Kudos: 9





	Anger

He is young and he is learning to love beyond the hem of his mother's skirt and the tasseled sash that circles his father's waist. 

Safe with them, with the trust in them, he is released into the creche of lectures and schooling at the temples with a fervor to reach for the friendships and marvel that books and stories have promised him.

They tried to warn him, ready him, with a child's edge tucked in his boot and his mother's kiss on his brow warning him to learn to live with vipers and be a cleverer one. He makes a foolish promise, then, that he will be better than fine, that he will make them proud.

He doesn't find the fairy tale. Instead, he knows injustice. It's subtle, insidious, building like a clever beaver — averted eyes when the older boy makes fun of his eyes, chastising words from the elder who instills onto them philosophy, patronizing him for his questions. Every little thing building up a dam that stores resentment. 

He speaks brazenly, first— a mistake that paints him a target. Worse one is to fight on the level. Fighting fire with fire he pours oil into the pyre of his peers' learnt disdain and for all that so many things they do not know, children are a relay of their parent's words. Thinblood, whoreson. They tell him his eyes look like puke, that his mouth smells like an old bog, they come up with lies that hurt more than they should. 

The first time eckes all involved a severe punishment. His is a punishment enough that he has a mouth full of blood that isn't his and a cheek cut on someone else's knuckles. His father tilts his chin up to see it under the lamp and asks him what he will do to win.

He doesn't know. He doesn't know and he wants to cry, and he wants to ask for help so badly but the words don't come. They rest in the back of his throat, stuck in a web of eyes that look away and children's laughter. 

He lies. He smiles— ignores the painful tug it gives on the bruise, the cut— and says that he knows just a thing.

In the dark of his room, alone, is when the confidence shatters alongside with his sleep. He cannot close his eyes, hiccuping tears away into the pillow quietly, persistently. 

His tears save him that night, keeping him awake to a creak of boots on the windowsill and the dull sound of leather sheath catching the flat of the intruder's side. 

The dagger is far from him that night, too far on his nightstand and he is too terrified to move— eyes on the backlit figure that steps softly towards his bed. Pauses, listening. 

He forgets how to cry, too, in that moment. He can only breathe panicked thoughts flashing him a sharp realization that the man expects him to be asleep. 

All Khalid can do is force his lungs to draw his all too fast breaths as quietly as possible. He doesn't understand why this person is here but all he can be is be afraid. It doesn't click until he sees the glint of a blade, raised above where he is huddled under the covers.

He doesn't remember what happens next, not very well. The spike of absolute terror that gives wings to his limbs, bolting away from the bed. Towards the door, towards his parent's rooms where he knows he would be safe. The searing hot pain, the surprised curse from the man who had to change his quiet stab into a slash— free hand failing to pin the small body down. 

He remembers how cold the floor felt, the wood rough against his finger— how every movement made a hot iron streak from his spine into the tips of his fingers. How he tumbled and couldn't get up for the slick under his elbow and the hot river pouring down his back. How screaming has hurt but how he couldn't stop.

The door bursting open, Nader's axe flung towards his offender — thrown. A terrifying wet noise accompanied by a hollow sound shattered bones. The heavy body falling over his, the sword stained red with his blood, blood, the blood pooling together even as Nader's arms moved him from under the corpse as though he were a newborn babe… 

How the world felt bright and new in a flash of an impossible moment. Blood moving on it's own, pouring back towards his ruined body. Warmth running to his back, his fingers. The legs he never realised he has not felt since he fell. 

_ It was not all, it was not  enough , he had a bleary thought, back then.  _ The wound still oozed and tugged at his ribs, pain searing but bearable. _ Not enough in him to make it alright. Not yet. _

It did not make sense, that thought. It scares him still, the alien tilt to it, so sure and bitter. Distant like a star curled over itself in pain.

Nader carried him to the healers. Magic and rest, the wound having had left him in bed for a month, waiting for the wound to become a thin scar across his back.


End file.
